Linux On the Desktop: 0.24 Percent?

Canyon Rat writes: "According to this story, less than a quarter of a percent of desktop users have adopted Linux. The survey was based on web surfers so it may be accurate." Anne Onymus adds a link to an interesting reaction over at lowendmac.com.

Comments

The problem is..

[Rosonowski]

The problem with a web survey is that websites are targeted, much like television, to a specific audeince. That audience is more or less likely to be a windows/linux user, and as such, the results are likely flawed. Kind of like if you tried to do an OS survey on slashdot. Linux would have a much higher rating, would it not?

Re:The problem is..

[noser]

From time to time I take a look at the pie chart on Google's Zeitgeist page, where they display the relative proportions of operating systems used to access Google. I figure it is a pretty good rough benchmark, as I know they get a lot of traffic from Linux users, so I would expect the representation of Linux on that chart to be high, but we are reading one percent!

It is sobering to see how much the Microsoft browsers have really taken over on the internet. One thing that does make me rest a litte easier about it though is the Mozilla project, and how AOL basicly forces people to use their gecko-based browser instead of IE, so the web is not in too much immediate danger of falling into a MSIE-only club.

I understand that it isn't really reasonable to expect that there would be a large proportion of Linux users though. I agree with some of the other posters that measurements like this are probably more likely to move our way once more people begin to access the internet through Linux embedded devices like cellphones and PDA's, set-top boxes, etc. "Linux on the desktop" probably won't seem like such a big deal as the desktop paradigm begins to fade. I imagine a future where the only people who even use a PC like we do now would be developers or scientists. Regular types will probably surf the web with all manner of specialized devices, and maybe not even think of it as 'surfing', but 'checking the weather', or 'looking something up'.

Here we go...

[forgoil]

I bet that there will be at least 100 posts saying that you can't trust this kind of data, that it's complete bollocks and yada yada yada Linux is so good it will for Bill to eat Linus used shorts.

Please don't care about that article, it's not interesting really. It's not really news. We all know what we use ourselves (XP and linux in my case) and I suggest that our time should be spent on something better than surveys and such things.

Writing serious and useful documentation for linux for instance, and putting it into XML and making it readable and searchable in different applications (such as the exellent Konqi, the only other browser besides IE I would ever dream of using). Go do that instead of reading all the pointlessness that this news consists of.

Representative data

[Cpyder]

well, as the mac article points out, the Hitbox users aren't really representative... But what about Google??? About everybody uses google... So let's see what they have to tell:
Windows (all versions): 93 %
Macintosh: 4%
Linux: 1%
Other: 4%

Detailed figures on browsers and operating systems on their site. I think Google can be considered quite representative, not?
(posted with Konqueror / Linux)

Re:Representative data

[nEoN nOoDlE]

That only proves that Linux users don't search for stuff online cause they're so knowledgable while Windows users have to resort to search engines to get where they're going! Your statistics are LIES! Or maybe Windows users just search for more porn.

Survey says...

[adubey]

I've had some training in statistics, and I see a number of problems. First, the slashdot editors are making the perennial journalists' mistake of misinterpretting statistics. Statmarket only claims to be measuring web client usage, and doesn't make any claims about the desktop market in general (at least from what I saw).

In terms of the study itself, statmarket admits that the sample is "self-selected" rather than randomly selected. This results in a biased sample. In particular, since they are offering a service to business users, the sample is likely biased in favour of business sites. The bias is then against more "arty" or technologically-oriented sites, resulting in lower-than-expected numbers from Macintosh and Linux users. It might also be biased against home users.

That said, while the survey may be off by an order of magnitude, I wouldn't expect it to be off by more than an order of magnitude. Most other surveys don't put Linux usage at more than 2 or 3%

Our Stats ...

[SirSlud]

.. as taken from our counter for the site www.pseudodictionary.com, a site that has NOTHING to do with computers.

Win 98 80178 (45%)
Win 2000 33183 (18%)
Unknown 17948 (10%)
Win NT 15051 (8%)
Mac 13085 (7%)
Win 95 11717 (6%)
Linux 2459 (1%)
Win 3.x 1055 (0%)
Unix 761 (0%)
WebTV 226 (0%)
OS/2 24 (0%)
Amiga 4 (0%)

The scariest thing is that win98 is still 45%. If not being part of that 45% is wrong, I don't wanna be right, baby!

Browser Identification Strings

[Rushuru]

The other problem that may drive *nix browsing market share is that there is a gazillion browsers who all have different identification strings. Very often, poorly designed stats system will not even notice that a given browser is actually a linux one, and will classify it as unknown.

Also, many poorly designed sites ony lets people with Ms IE 4 or Netscape 4 visit the site. Opera, mozilla, konqueror users have to fake the identification strings to be able to see the site. And, as a matter of fact, I know several people who have set their browsers' id string to be IE like, to avoid troubles.

There's no arguing that Linux's desktop market share is far lesser than that or windows and mac, but I do think and hope it's above 0.24%

Where they get their stats.

[Carnage4Life]

According to their Research methodology page

StatMarket publishes statistics based on the combined data from tens of millions of daily Internet users visiting the tens of thousands of sites that use WebSideStory's HitBox Enterprise and other HitBox Web audience analysis services. HitBox is an outsourced Web site measurement and analysis service that provides real-time statistics about online visitor behavior.

...

While the 125,000+ Web sites worldwide that HitBox monitors are self-selected, StatMarket's figures are culled from more than 50 million unique visitors who visit those sites every day

Re:Where they get their stats.

[zmooc]

Still, that doesn't have to be a guarantee at all. It is very well possible that the sites that use hitbox are for some reason visited more by windows users (newbies?) than other sites. Sites with content that's more interesting to us geeks usually don't use hitbox (slashdot, google, blah). Porno sites for example work much better in windows (movies!). I'm not saying that Porno sites use HitBox more, but it's just one of the many examples. The only way to do such a survey right is by picking a few people randomly and then contact them by telephone. And then it's still possible that users of OS A are more willing to cooperate than users of OS B:)

Circular circle? :)

[ishark]

I like the answer on lowendmac. Not the article, but the statistics. Beside that, could it be that we're witnessing the same "netscape effect" of the web? The article says that lots of web developers use those statistics to build sites. Translation: they only target IE. I can believe this, since I use galeon and I often have quirks in commercial sites. Now, if your site works well only with IE I'm not surprised that 98% of the visitors use IE.... Just like netscape-enhanced sites used to justify their attitude by saying that "90%+ of the visitors use netscape"....

(Note: I use Windows == IE. I don't know the statistics of Ns/Mozilla/Opera vs IE on windows, am I guessing right that they are a tiny %?).

hitbox ignores client without javascript

[gregor_b_dramkin]

from the FAQ at http://www.hitboxcentral.com:

"HitBox will record nothing if:

• The referring site does not link to the page containing the HitBox Main Code or you have not installed the HitBox Main Page code properly (Free HitBox V5 only).
• The HitBox code does not fully execute.
• The reverse DNS lookup is unable to complete.
• The visitor's JavaScript is disabled. "

I'd say that a Linux user is much more apt/able to turn off Javascript in their browser than an IE user.